This invention relates to an interface mechanism for manipulating financial information, and more particularly to manipulating detailed billing information.
Banks have historically played an important part in the payment of consumer bills. For instance, banks have provided checking accounts and direct transactions which enable consumers to pay their bills. Billing has typically been from an individual vendor to the consumer. Consolidation has occurred with the introduction and use of bank credit cards. Still, the consumer billing system typically involves a vendor sending out a bill to a consumer typically through the postal service. The consumer is required to receive the billing correspondence, open the document and locate the bill within the promotional material. It will be noted that bill may be reviewed and mentally scheduled for payment while being physically kept in a box, drawer, etc. When the bill is paid, the consumer writes a check, and returns a part of the bill to the vendor for processing typically by a lock box service.
Computerized banking has been offered for a number of years by many financial institutions. However, this service typically has concerned checking and manipulating balances between a consumer""s account. Some banks offer computerized bill payment, however, unless the payee has an account at the same institution as the payer, an actual paper check is typically printed by the bank and mailed. Thus, the consumer does not have their bills presented to this system, only the ability to pay the bills they have scheduled or entered into the system.
Because the Internet evolved from the ARPAnet, a research experiment that supported the exchange of data between government contractors and (often academic) researchers, an on-line culture developed that is alien to the corporate business world. Although the Internet was not designed to make commercialization easy, Internet banking is rapidly evolving to provide an enhancement to computerized bill payment, permitting businesses, other organizations and individuals to communicate throughout the world. The growth and popularity of the Internet is providing new opportunities for electronic commerce, including new methods of merchandising and payment. Payment systems are evolving to better serve the new forms of commerce. Presently most Internet payments are made with credit card transactions. However, in order for the Internet to develop as a significant commercial marketplace, other payment alternatives which are acceptable to the business and consumer must be available.
While the demand for conducting business over the Internet continues to increase, individuals and businesses desiring to effect payments on the Internet face many barriers. Internet users operate on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Businesses, who need to reach a maximum number of consumers, may be unwilling to be constrained by Internet payment systems that fail to operate across major hardware and software platforms. Consumers cannot conduct business with merchants whose systems do not readily interface with their system. In addition, banks and other financial institutions currently process transactions under a wide variety of networks and protocols that are well-established and extremely difficult and expensive to change.
The incompatibility of the various billing and transaction activities in addition to the dilemma of vendors who sell products through traditional channels but would like to offer billing and payment over the Internet presents serious limitations to true Internet banking. Typically consumers must manually check their bills and then enter them into an Internet bank system for payment. Even where the vendor""s system is fully compatible with the payer""s Internet bank system, the payer must manually check their accounts for bills in order to know that they have a bill for payment.
Numerous money management software programs in addition to spreadsheet programs exists to assist a consumer in tracking their bills and payments. However, they require that the consumer must enter the billing and payment information. To track individual entries to a particular account or cost center requires further detail entry or posting to a general ledger type system.
Moreover, utilization of the above-mentioned Internet banking systems requires that when a consumer has a question about a transaction or item on a bill they must typically call in their query to a customer service representative.
Accordingly, there is a need for providing a network billing and payment system providing automatic access to detailed transactions which permit the aliasing of entries and provides automatic consumer query capabilities.
The present invention is a method for manipulating billing and payment information. The method comprises the steps of: loading billing information stored at a local location; accessing retained criteria; formatting field information within a data record automatically; acting on the retained criteria; displaying the formatted field information; and operating on the formatted field information.